Deirdre Barrett’s ‘Waistland’ combines scientific findings about the lifestyle and diet of early humans with recent data to shed new light on dieters’ impulses and urges, as well as on what a healthy diet should look like, and how best to stick to one. Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office |
Getting to obesity’s bottom lineNew book examines roots of public’s hungerJuly 2, 2007By Alvin Powell
Hunter-gatherer instincts set loose in a world of modern food abundance are at the root of today’s obesity crisis, according to a Harvard psychologist. Deirdre Barrett, psychologist with the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance and assistant clinical professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, says food manufacturers and advertising campaigns play to our Paleolithic instincts. They overemphasize the qualities of certain food items that appeal to the hunter-gatherer in us, creating “supernormal stimuli,” cues on an unnatural object that make it more desirable — and harder to resist — than the natural object it mimics. Our bodies evolved in a world where salt, sugar, and fat were scarce and desirable. We live, however, in a word where those substances are not only plentiful, but in which images of them in different forms are beamed at us constantly. |
